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Invited Speakers

Christian Jensen

Aarhus University, Denmark

Querying the Web with Local Intent

Location: “Aula Pio XII”

Tuesday 4th of June 2013 9:00am - 10:00am

Session Chair: Claudio Bettini

Abstract:

In step with the rapid proliferation of mobile devices with Internet access, the web is increasingly being access by mobile-device users on the move. Further, it is increasingly possible to accurately geo-position mobile devices, and increasing volumes of geo-positioned content, e.g., web pages, business directory entries, and microblog posts, are becoming available on the web. In short, an increasingly mobile and spatial web is fast emerging. This development enables web queries with local intent, i.e., keyword-based queries issued by users who are looking for web content near them. In addition, it implies an increasing demand for query functionality that supports local intent.
A spatial web query takes user-location data and user-supplied keywords as arguments and returns web content that is spatially and textually relevant to these arguments. Many different kinds of relevant spatial web queries may be envisioned. Based on recent and ongoing work by the speaker and his colleagues, the talk offers an account of efforts that aim to invent and enable new spatial web querying functionality that is meaningful, easy to use, meets perceived user needs, and can be supported efficiently. The talk covers the ideas and concepts underlying different kinds of query functionality; it outlines techniques capable of supporting the different kinds of functionality; and it presents new challenges yet to be addressed.

Bio

Christian S. Jensen is a Professor of Computer Science at Aarhus University, Denmark, and he was previously at Aalborg University for two decades. He recently spent a 1-year sabbatical at Google Inc., Mountain View. His research concerns data management and data-intensive systems, and its focus is on temporal and spatio-temporal data management. Christian is an ACM and an IEEE fellow, and he is a member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters and the Danish Academy of Technical Sciences. He has received several national and international awards for his research. He is currently vice-chair of ACM SIGMOD and an editor-in-chief of The VLDB Journal.

Michel R. Parent

INRIA, France

Automated vehicles: autonomous or connected?

Location: “Aula Pio XII”

Wednesday 5th of June 2013 8:30am - 9:30am

Session Chair: Ouri Wolfson

Abstract:

Fully automated vehicles have been a research topic for more than 30 years. Recently, based essentially on the expertise of the best DARPA teams, Google demonstrated several autonomous vehicles that were driven several thousands of miles in California and Nevada, forcing these states (and Florida) to pass legislation concerning the operation of autonomous vehicles on public roads. In 2010, a team from Parma University demonstrated 2 automated vehicles driving in tandem from Italy to China. These concepts of "autonomous" (meaning without communication with other vehicles or infrastructure) vehicles will soon appear on the market if the legislative barriers concerning the safety can be lifted. However, this approach does not seem to bring much improvements in terms of road capacity as long as the automatic vehicles are « autonomous » and share the road space with non-cooperative vehicles.
However, automated vehicles do not need to be autonomous in the sense that they can be connected. Through communication, automated vehicles can become much more efficient, for example by implementing platoon operation as in the Chauffeur or Sartre European projects. Automatic vehicles can also cooperate with the infrastructure to improve the management of the infrastructure by variable speed limits of intersection management. Through communications, automated and regular vehicles can also cooperate to improve safety and efficiency. Finally, cooperative automatic vehicles can form a very efficient transport system in the case of cybercars: a public transport system in dedicated areas such as those operating at Heathrow airport or Masdar, the eco-city of Abu-Dhabi.

Bio

Michel Parent is currently scientific advisor to IMARA, the INRIA research team on advanced road transport. This team focuses on research and development of information and communication technologies for road transport and in particular on fully automated vehicles (the cybercars). He was the creator and director of this team between 1991 and 2010 and is considered as the “father” of the cybercar concept as he was the coordinator of the European Project CyberCars between 2001 and 2004 and the follow-up project CyberCars2 (2006-2009). He was involved in many other French or European projects on ITS and he is recognized worldwide as an expert in innovative transportation technologies.
Before his positions at IMARA, Michel Parent has spent half of his time in research and academia at such places as Stanford University and MIT in the USA and INRIA in France, and the other half in the robotics industry. He was the president of the French Robotics Association between 1974 and 1979. He is the author of several books on robotics, vision and intelligent vehicles, and numerous publications and patents.
Michel Parent has an engineering degree from the French Aeronautics School (ENSAE), a Masters degree in Operation Research and a Ph.D. in Computer Science, both from Case Western Reserve University, USA.

Roberto Zafalon

STMicroelectronics, Italy

Smart System Design: Industrial Challenges and Perspectives

Location: “Aula Pio XII”

Thursday 6th of June 2013 8:30am - 9:30am

Session Chair: Archan Misra

Abstract:

Smart systems consist of heterogeneous subsystems and components providing different functionalities; they are normally implemented as Multi-Package on a Board. To fully
exploit the potential of current nano-technologies, as well as to enable the integration of existing/new IPs and More than Moore devices, smart system miniaturization and Multi-Chip in a Package implementation are unavoidable. Furthermore, such goals are only achievable if dedicated M2M interfaces and SW tools for smart subsystems/components design and integration are available to designers and system integrators.
This paper offers an overview of the major challenges, as perceived from the industrial point of view, to be faced when pursuing effective smart system design capabilities, discussing and motivating the needs and the market opportunities.

Bio

Dr. Roberto Zafalon, EU Projects Director - Italy, R&D and Public Affairs, is in charge to foster and leverage the link between ST technology groups and the R&D cooperative EU programs. Until June 2007 he has been the head of the Competence Center for Low Power System Design at the Advanced System Technology R&D group in ST Microelectronics, Agrate Brianza (Milano), Italy.
In his current capacity since July 2007, he elaborates the vision and roadmap, seeks for project financing and drives industrial R&D teams to pursue innovative solutions in
the field of embedded systems and nanolectronics, for corporate product divisions and labs.
He is an active member of ENIAC’s working groups, Steering Board member of ARTEMIS-IA and EPOSS (the European Technology Platform on Smart Systems Integration) and Board member of A4M-IT (the Italian branch of Alliance for Material Europe).
He has been the General Project Manager and Coordinator of major Integrated Projects under FP6, FP7 and JTI calls 2009-2012. He has been serving as independent expert to review FP7-ICT and ARTEMIS project submitted to some past calls.
He contributed to over 75 international scientific publications so far, including conferences, Journals/Transactions, invited papers and Books. He gave invited full-day Tutorials talks on research topics related to “Low power design, architectures and methodologies” at many distinguished IEEE international conferences, including International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS), Design Automation and Test in Europe (DATE), Design Automation Conference (DAC), International Conference on CAD (ICCAD), International Conference on ASIC (ASICON) and Embedded Systems Conference (ESC).